Brandon Jennings to Europe - What Does it Mean?

So it is officially official now - Brandon Jennings will be skipping college to play professional basketball in Europe for a year before he is eligible for the NBA Draft. In a statement released through his lawyer, Jennings said

Over the course of the last two months I have consulted a number of people in basketball before coming to this decision. I would like to thank the University of Arizona for their interest and support through this process.

Jennings expects to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and endorsements, and has enlisted former shoe promoter Sonny Vaccaro as his advisor.

Ok, so now that we've laid out the basics, let's look at what this decision means. I've written in depth about it before here, but depending on his success in Europe, this could be a landmark decision. Hell, he might not even be the last one of the class of 2008 to go abroad (Demar Derozan still has not been declared eligible, although he is not considering Europe at this point). If Jennings performs well, earns a bunch of money, and maintains or increases his draft stock (most sites have him as a top 5 player in the 2009 draft, and the second point guard after Spain's Ricky Rubio), then why wouldn't more players follow in his footsteps? Spend a year playing professional basketball in Spain, or Greece, or Italy? Who wouldn't want to do that?

Think of it like he is doing a year studying abroad, with his major being basketball.

Seriously though, which way is better for an 18 year old who has been idolized since middle school to develop some maturity and responsibility - send him off to a college campus where he has to attend sleep through class for one semester, he is the target for numerous agents, runners and other unsavory people, and lives on or near a college campus where trouble, frat parties, and sorority girls are never hard to find; or spend a year playing professional basketball against grown men, who could care less about your "hype" and would like nothing more than to prove themselves against you (be it with a basket or an errant elbow), in a country where you don't know anyone, don't speak the language, and don't get treated like a superstar everywhere you go. I'll go with the latter.

There are some risks for Jennings. European basketball is a much different style. They expect their point guards to set up the offense and be distributors, which is not his forte. Jennings is a creator and a play maker, and needs the ball in his hands to be effective (I don't want to say shoot-first, because he is a good passer and unselfish - think Chris Paul). He is also much more effective in the open court. Not many teams across the pond play that way. European teams also have a tendency to not play their young stars (especially if they are a rent-a-player like Jennings will be).

Look, I love college basketball more than anything - that is why I spend a ridiculous amount of time working on this blog with almost nothing in return (just click on some ads!!). If recruits do start to follow Jennings lead and head to Europe, it will be a bad thing for college basketball in the short term, but could be a very good thing in the long term. Maybe this is what it takes for the NCAA and the NBA to get rid of the ridiculous one-year rule.

The rule is essentially in place to ensure that players in the NBA draft will be recognizable and marketable when they are picked. But if the top prospects start heading to Europe to play, then the NBA will lose the marketable players - if Derrick Rose led Maccabi Tel-Aviv to the Euro finals last year, would the general public have been as interested in the Rose-Beasley debate?

Jason Whitlock wrote a great article on the exploitation of college basketball and football players, which - if you have read this blog before you should know - I completely agree with (although I think he brings race into it a little too much, but it's Whitlock, what do you expect). Basically, what he is saying is that if we are going to force these kids to go to college for a year, then why keep up the fallacy of calling them "student-athletes"? Why do we force them to go to classes that, for the majority of these players, will have no effect on them?

These kids generate so much revenue for the NCAA, their schools, and the networks that air the games (CBS and ESPN), but don't see a (legal) dime for their effort (what value does a scholarship have to a one-and-done player). Isn't there something wrong with that?

Whitlock proposes two solutions for this problem:

1. Acknowledge that college basketball and football players are entertainer-athletes, not student-athletes. Bring them on campus, pay them, free them of academic responsibility and let them entertain students, alums, boosters and fans while auditioning for a pro career.

2. Form an alliance with the NFL and NBA and invest in education/athletic academies for talented young basketball and football players (of all colors) beginning in eighth and ninth grade.

The NCAA pays its basketball and football players with a currency (education) many of them aren't prepared to spend or value. That has to change, and it's incumbent on the NCAA to be a big part of the change.

I don't care how solution No. 2 jibes with Title IX. Is there something in our Constitution that states a TV contract driven by (mostly) black basketball players must be used to fix America's history of sexism? The money can't be used to educate basketball players when they're 13, 14 and 15 and there's a chance of getting them to a level where they can compete academically in college?

I agree with both of these, especially the first one. But I would take it a step further. Why not make basketball (or football or baseball) a major? I mean, for most of these guys it is the career that they are pursuing. No one has a problem if a pre-med student only takes science classes and doesn't take, say, an english class. And what's more, these schools can actually educate these athletes in areas where it could actually help them.

If you read Some Links, Some News yesterday, then you know that an absurd number of professional athletes end up broke - for reasons varying from scams to bad investments to plain old dumb spending decisions. Why not educate them on how to spot a scam or a fraud, or how to manage and save their money, or what a good investment plan could be? Part of the reason 60% of NBA players are broke five years after they retire is that they spend a huge amount of money in fees by hiring people to take care of things like money management, simply because they do not know how.

This is the kind of education that these kids need, and it is the kind of education that will benefit them even if they are only there for one year. And if the classes are presented in a way that makes it seem like not only will the education provide protection against losing their money, but actually net them a higher return on what they will already be making, I bet you actually get some of these kids paying attention in the classroom.